By Anait Miridzhanian, Anathi Madubela and Sfundo Parakozov
DAKAR/JOHANNESBURG, June 24 (Reuters) – The Ebola outbreak in Democratic Republic of Congo is still outpacing response efforts, and frontline health workers there face very risky conditions, World Health Organization officials said on Wednesday.
The outbreak of the rare Bundibugyo strain of Ebola has infected over 1,000 people in Congo and 20 in neighbouring Uganda, reaching the highest first-month total of any episode of the disease.
It was detected late, as experts say the virus had already been circulating for months before it was officially declared on May 15.
“Despite the good progress we have made, we still face major challenges, and the outbreak is continuing to outpace the response,” WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus told a press conference from the organization’s headquarters in Geneva that was broadcast online.
The WHO’s Abdirahman Mahamud said health workers continued to face “abduction threats, crimes and being in the wrong place at the wrong time”, citing seven incidents in which they had been targeted.
Local people are often deeply distrustful of officialdom and outsiders in a region scarred by decades of war. They also resent not being allowed to bury loved ones, in accordance with local traditions, due to precautions taken to keep the virus from spreading. Some are convinced that Ebola is a hoax.
Angry locals have attacked some treatment sites, and forced health workers away from a displacement camp where there were cases of Ebola.
Contact-tracing has been complicated by the fact that the epicentre of the outbreak in Congo’s Ituri province is a mining area, where many young men from different parts of the country come to work.
Those mine workers don’t always have close contacts with the local community, so it can be hard to trace people they have been in touch with, while some return home and inadvertently spread the virus to new areas, another WHO official said.
Congo’s testing capacity has been ramped up to roughly 2,000 per day from 30 at the beginning of the outbreak, the WHO said.
“A big priority of the response is to scale up decentralisation of the testing,” the U.N. agency’s Maria Van Kerkhove said.
(Reporting by Anait Miridzhanian in Dakar and Anathi Madubela and Sfundo Parakozov in Johannesburg;Editing by Alexander Winning and Gareth Jones)
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